Introduction When the Archaeological Museum in Iraklion closed in 2006 for renovation, curators gath- ered the highlights of the collection in a special display until the projected reopening in 2012. Featured in the alcove devoted to religion are some of the objects from the so-called Temple Repositories at Knossos, most prominently two faience figurines of women holding snakes, pop- ularly known as the ‘Snake Goddesses’ (HM 63 and HM 65) (Figures 1 and 2). Iconic images, the statuettes appear in most general studies of Disarming the Snake Goddess: A Reconsideration of the Faience Figurines from the Temple Repositories at Knossos Emily Miller Bonney Dept. of Liberal Studies, California State Fullerton, Box 6868 Fullerton, CA 92834, USA E-mail: ebonney@fullerton.edu Abstract he two reconstituted faience igurines from the Temple Repositories at Knossos were restored by Sir Arthur Evans as epitomes of elite women of the Neopalatial period and objects of an indigenous palatial cult of the Snake Goddess. hey have appeared as such in the literature for the past century. his article reassesses the accuracy of Evans’s characterization by examining only the original fragments—a head, two torsos and the remnants of a lounced skirt—to determine whether the coifures, clothing, and gestures have parallels in Cretan art. his process reveals that the igures do not have close parallels, for the most part, within the Cretan tradition. Furthermore, there are no Cretan iconographic sources for the images of the women as par- ticipants in the cult of the Snake Goddess, whether as goddesses or as priestesses. Rather, the craftsmen who created them employed motifs from the Syrian artistic tradition most likely relying on the representations of the goddess opening her skirt and the renderings of Syrian goddesses with cylindrical crowns, straight hair, and robes with thick edges. he elites who ordered the production of the igurines did so within the context of the construction of the Middle Minoan III palace at Knossos. At a time of heightened interaction with the late Middle Bronze Age monarchies of the Levant, the elites at Knossos emulated Syrian iconography as an assertion of their access to exotic knowledge and control of trade. When the Middle Minoan III palace was destroyed, the igurines were deposited in the Temple Repositories, and their iconography was buried with them. here is no trace of them in subsequent Neopalatial art. Keywords: snake goddess, Syria, Neopalatial Crete, Knossos Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 24.2 (2011) 171-190 ISSN (Print) 0952-7648 ISSN (Online) 1743-1700 © The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v24i2.171 the art and culture of Bronze Age Crete as exam- ples of Neopalatial Cretan haute couture and as evidence for a cult of the Snake Goddess. But they fill these roles because Arthur Evans recon- structed them to do so. Scholars, as they do with Knossos itself (Hitchcock and Koudounaris 2002), recognize that the statuettes are flawed restorations, but accept Evans’s interpretation as fundamentally appropriate. This paper aims to rectify the situation by deconstructing these early twentieth-century products and problema- tizing Evans’s claim that they both epitomize